Then there’s the somewhat more abstract wake of our deeds. On the large scale there’s the wake we call history: the deeds of the famous and infamous, the talented and the super-talented. On the small scale, there’s the wake of personal and familial interaction: the good and bad behavioral traits passed from one generation to the next, the Scylla of crime, the Charybdis of greed and so on.

Some have spoken of still vaster wakes that extend far into the unplumbable world of metaphysics: sin, for one; karma, for another.

With the recent eruption again of massive human violence, I’ve lately begun to think about war wakes, not as a clever thought experiment but perhaps as a powerful and dangerous reality, the always present wallpaper decorating this belligerent planetary kindergarten, quietly and invisibly teaching the children the wrong lessons about what it means to be human, here.

I was born in 1936. My first hint of the existence of a war wake came in the late summer of 1945. I remember vividly the moment when the news came over the radio that the Japanese had surrendered and World War II was at an end. A feeling of utter relief swept through my nine-year-old body. It was as if, living for years under dark and stormy skies, I hadn’t known of sunshine, yet suddenly the clouds parted, and there was the sun.

The next hint came in 1950. This time what I remember is the disappearance of the sun. I was riding in the back of a 1949 Ford station wagon (the SUV of its day), with the tailgate down, watching the highway through the Arkansas Ozark Mountains disappear behind us. The car radio was on, from which came a voice announcing invasion and war in Korea. I remember the feeling: the clouds were back, though at the time I did not associate them with the feeling I had lived with during World War II.

Then came the slow, insidious gathering of clouds over Vietnam. I recall no single moment of renewed despair and loss of sunlight, but at some point—1965? 1966?—I knew the sun was gone again. Its return, because of the long duplicity of Nixon and Kissinger, was as slow as had been its disappearance caused by the duplicity of Johnson and McNamara.

Now, on March 17, 2003 and the Bush Ultimatum, the clouds were back, and in my dotage I am finally thinking with as much awareness as I can muster of the possibility of "war wakes."

Are there, on some level of which science as yet knows nothing, storms of consciousness? Moving violently through this world, do we also wreak havoc in realms which impinge on with our disruptive thoughts and emotions, realms which are perhaps intimately congruent with, this world but which we simply do not perceive?

The instances from my own experience are indeed scanty evidence, but looking back, I see a faint, disturbing pattern which, if real, has profound implications for us, for our history, for our children and how they continue to learn and replicate our ancient violence.

The most disturbing evocation of such a distant yet intimate reality—the wakes of war made quite clear—occurs in Doris Lessing’s disconcerting novel of insanity, Briefing for a Descent into Hell. The protagonist, who exists in world out of time and out of mind, at one point rises from the surface of the earth far into space and there, with expanded vision, sees a planet in despair, fraught with massive storms of gloom, doom, and death and lightened occasionally only by the tiniest flickers of pure white light where this or that individual or group thinks and acts otherwise: wisely, pacifically, lovingly.

Could it be that the famously derided "pathetic fallacy"—the old belief that the weather reflects human mood—is fallacious only in the physical realm? That there is in fact a "pathetic resonanace"—a "wake" if you will—in realms we haven’t yet learned to perceive? Do we with our outrageous violence continuously and psychically decorate the planet with patterns of blood and death, unleashing huge, long-lasting storms, such that our children, always more sensitive than their shut-down elders, are invisibly taught: This is the way things are?

Is there a lesson here? If so, it is this: If the clouds are of our unwitting making, then their removal can be of our wholly witting unmaking. All we have to do is to learn to see.

END